Anna Deavere Smith Quotes
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When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
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I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators 'the haute couture of language.'
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I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.
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Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.
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Because of the generation in which I came into the world, there were expectations. Of course there were expectations. It was something having to do with being a respectable Negro woman who would make the people in Baltimore proud.
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I never know when somebody's going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn't have anticipated.
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Listening is not just hearing what someone tells you word for word. You have to listen with a heart. I don't want that to sound touchy-feely; it is not. It is very hard work.
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Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
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Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.
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Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.
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Over time, my students have gotten richer and more educated.
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You hang around actors, or dancers, the minute you sneeze, everybody has a remedy, and we're all on a million different kinds of diets, and different kinds of things that we do for exercise.
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I think as a kid I always liked to listen to people. I loved hearing stories.
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I think a lot of L.A. is something like USC - this incredible white culture living in the midst of color, and no obvious reaction to it at all. I mean, they have guards at the gate at USC - guards at the gate of a major university! And the guards chase young black boys away - I've seen it, chasing 8-year-old boys.
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I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way.
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Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
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If you think about what acting is supposed to be, my job is to disappear.
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I'm interested when things are upside down - because there are so many possibilities in that one moment. There is a lot that is exposed.
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I see myself first and foremost as a student of expression.
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We would like doctors to listen, but the fact is, we better be ready to be able to talk to them. You're going to have to be an active participant in that conversation, so I'd say the American people are going to need ways of stepping up to the conversation.
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Making your life is ultimately an extraordinarily creative endeavor.
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Identity is an assemblage of constellations.
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I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
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Not that many people, even contemporary writers, write about right now.